Reference is made to commonly-assigned copending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/159,929, filed May 30, 2002, by Jones, et al, and U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 10/159,437, 10/159,884, 10/159,877, 10/159,883, 10/159,898, 10/159,424, 10/159,902, 10/159,358, and 10/159,931, filed May 30, 2002, by Jones, all of which are entitled: LOAD AND FEED APPARATUS FOR SOLID INK, the disclosures of which are incorporated herein.
Solid ink jet printers were first offered commercially in the mid-1980""s. One of the first such printers was offered by Howtek Inc. which used pellets of colored cyan, yellow, magenta and black ink that were fed into shape coded openings. These openings fed generally vertically into the heater assembly of the printer where they were melted into a liquid state for jetting onto the receiving medium. The pellets were fed generally vertically downwardly, using gravity feed, into the printer. These pellets were elongated and tapered on their ends with separate rounded, five, six, and seven sided shapes each corresponding to a particular color.
Later solid ink printers, such as the Tektronix Phase(trademark), the Tektronix Phaser(trademark) 300, and the Jolt printer offered by Dataproducts Corporation, used differently shaped solid ink sticks that were either gravity fed or spring loaded into a feed channel and pressed against a heater plate to melt the solid ink into its liquid form. These ink sticks were shape coded and of a generally small size. One system used an ink stick loading system that initially fed the ink sticks into a preload chamber and then loaded the sticks into a load chamber by the action of a transfer lever. Earlier solid or hot melt ink systems used a flexible web of hot melt ink that is incrementally unwound and advanced to a heater location or vibratory delivery of particulate hot melt ink to the melt chamber.
Basic configurations of a four-color ink loader having independent melt plates have been described in previously issued patents such as, for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,734,402, 5,861,903, and 6,056,394. The disclosures of these patents are hereby incorporated by reference in their entirety.
Embodiments include a solid ink loader, which includes at least one feed channel for receiving ink sticks, at least one key plate for covering the at least one feed channel, wherein the at least one key plate includes a first receptacle, and a first insertion opening surround element that mates with the first receptacle, wherein the first insertion opening surround element includes a first ink stick insertion opening for receiving first ink sticks.